Resistance is Insidious

it gets under your skin and through your defences

Aug 19, 2026

I really like The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Right until the bit about angels, which I just don’t really understand (an atheist thing, perhaps?). What really resonates with me is the amorphous villain…

Resistance.

It is all the things that impede sitting down and writing, or doing whatever your creative endeavour is. If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s short. Pressfield described Resistance on his blog as such:

Resistance is an impartial force of nature, like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. Resistance is clever. It knows if it personalizes its manifestations, it can deceive us and slip past our defenses. It’s like the software that enables direct-mail marketers to send us letter and e-mails addressed, “Dear Susie.” It’s bullshit. Resistance doesn’t know who we are and it doesn’t care.

This month I both lost and won the battle against resistance.

I finished and released some short stories. Oorah! But if thinking of a way to promote this I started writing about writing, again.

Did ya hear about Blaugust? It’s a festival of blogging. Which is fucking rad, obviously. Except if you’re already working on a bunch of other projects. I couldn’t help myself and started down the path of blogging every day. I got four days in.

I wrote about clearing creative debt. Which essentially is about applying the same principles of clearing financial debt to completing creative projects. Great idea. I managed to smash through two of my long lingering porjects with this.

Then I started blogging about.

The second one I wrote was on my patreon. I had this behind a paywall because I cut loose a bit and wrote about my life before being a teacher. When I didn’t have responsibilities and lived a little more edgy. Obviously, my students found my Patreon that week so in a panic I deleted the post. But it was pretty good, yeh?

The third was just about creativity and some quotes i like. Things that resonate with me. Things I want to share.

On the fourth day of Blaugust, I sat down to write about Resistance again. This is when I realised I had not written a single work on the manuscript nor completed any of the smaller lingering projects. I had, in my excitement from defeating Resistance, become a victim to Resistance. I forgot Pressfield’s words;